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Guide: Base Defense
This guide is designed to help players deal with the dangers they will encounter while playing FortressCraft: Evolved. It is divided into two major sections; Central Power Hub (CPH) Defense and Frozen Factory Defense as each has different defense strategies and objectives associated with them. The guide contains spoilers as to what creatures you'll encounter and how to deal with them. If you like surprises, turn away now. You can always come back later if you get stuck. The majority of content covered by the guide will refer to blueprints and items crafted in the Base Defense tab of your crafting window. CPH Defense This section will be most beneficial to new players, or players looking to shore up on the basics. Threat Threat determines the size and strength of the attacks sent to destroy your CPH. Your threat level is represented by a number ranging from 0 to 20,000. The higher the number, the higher the threat. Threat cannot go above 20,000. Early in the game, the mission system will advise you to build a Threat Scanner. The scanner will display your current threat number as well as other useful information such as when the next attack wave arrives. It will also sound an alarm when an attack has begun. An attack will come when the threat is 100 or above. Your threat level is determined by your Ores per minute, Bars per minute and Power per minute thus it can go both up and down depending on the current conditions of your base. For example, if one of your ore extractors get's blocked, your threat will go down relative to the amount of threat that ore extractor produced. You can see your ore, bars, and power per minute in the upper left corner of the Holobase view (default key is "K"). As of December 2015, threat was calculated as follows: * ('''(Bars Per Min / 20) + (Power Per Min / 2375) + (Ores Per Min / 275))* 100 In addition to the factors above, a player can forcefully lower or increase their threat level by building either a Threat Reducer to reduce your threat by 50 or a Threat Agitator to increase your threat by 10% and add 5 more mobs to the wave. You might wonder why someone would want to increase their threat. It is because the mobs you attract can drop valuable loot that players with heavy defenses may want to farm. Enemies Your CPH will be attacked by 3 different enemies; Wasps, Heavies, and Bosses. In my experience, the enemies first spawned at the following threat levels (note these are estimates, not confirmed). * Wasp - 100 threat * Heavy - 1,600 threat * Boss - 6,000 threat '''The number and ''health ''of enemies will increase as your threat level increases. Enemies will spawn at the four Overminds which are located +/- 320 meters in a diagonal direction from your CPH. Meaning if the flat faces of your CPH represent north, south, east and west, then the Wasps will attack you from the NE, NW, SE and SW. All three enemy types can fly, therefore building walls to hinder them is not an effective strategy; they will fly over them. You can't build walls to a height where they are unable to attack and doing so may draw the attention of Tunnel Nukers which can bore holes through mountains to make a straighter path for the Wasps Failure If you fail to protect your CPH from the Wasps, the following will occur. * You CPH will reboot. During this time it does not produce power. * Your threat level is artificially reduced to make the next attack easier. * Enemies will not spawn for an hour giving you time to bolster your defenses. * A failure count will be added to the Threat Scanner, reminding you how many times you've failed. * The Orbital Energy Transmitter (OET) will lose it's charge. Forcing you to begin the charge from zero again. * If you have the Frozen Factory Expansion, your Climate Control Centre (C5) will go offline until the CPH reboots. * If you created your world with the "Death Mode" difficulty set to Hardcore, you lose the game. Game over man. Based on the above, you can see the penalty for failure is pretty light for most of the game. Once the player enters the later stages of the game and wishes to charge the OET (or build a C5) will defending the CPH become most critical. Strategy This section will provide some very generic strategies to defend your CPH. The range of possible layouts and variations players can build are endless, from the ultra efficient to the purely aesthetic, therefore players are encouraged to experiment and build defenses to your liking. However if you're struggling to survive, these simple strategies should help you. The First Attack: You built a Threat Scanner and the siren goes off for the first time and you suddenly realize you haven't built any defenses. Don't panic, the first few waves are fairly weak and you can fend them off yourself with your Ray Gun (default hotkey "V"). Early Defenses: In the early stages of the game, you will be facing Wasps. They are fast, but weak. It comes down to personal preference, but I recommend skipping MK1 Turrets and going straight for MK2 Turrets. They are both unlocked with the Base Defence research project and both are built from T1 Plates and PCBs so they are both craftable at roughly the same time. For a slightly increased cost, MK2 Turrets provide significantly more power and a modest increase to range. Place the MK2 Turrets around 7-15m in the air roughly 5-10m from the corners of your CPH. Five well-powered MK2 Turrets per corner (20 total) should be enough to protect you from 100 threat to 1,600 threat when Heavies arrive. You can place them gradually as lower threat levels do not need that many. Mid-Game Defenses: For the purpose of this guide, mid-game is when the player has reached ~1,600 threat and has access to T2 ores, specifically Gold Ore. At this point you should start to encounter Heavies. While their appearance is significantly more frightening than their Wasp brethren, handling them is quite simple. Eight well-powered MK3 Turrets built within ~10-15m of your CPH will protect you from 1,600 threat to 5,000 when Bosses arrive. MK3 Turrets have a whopping 72m range compared to just 20m for the MK2 thus if you keep them relatively close to your CPH, all 8 can fire on enemies regardless of what angle they attack from. Late-Game Defenses: For this guide, this stage of the game is quite long. It begins at ~6,000 threat or when Bosses arrive and concludes when you have charged the OET and begin destroying the Overminds. This phase can be summed up in one word: Missiles. While MK3 Turrets are still effective, and you can win with only Turrets, it's recommended you begin to mass produce Missiles as they are the most effective weapon against Bosses. In addition, Missiles are less power hungry than Turrets. See the tips section below for more about that. At this stage, begin to expand your defenses toward the enemy. While in the early and mid-game it's reasonable to keep your defenses close and tight to the CPH, at this phase you should start to take the battle to the enemy hitting them hard and often. This should also help your frame rate too. SpiderBot: A quick note about the SpiderBot. SpiderBot's weapons are extremely potent and are easily the most cost effective defense weapon at your disposal. Once they've been built and equipped by SpiderBot, you only need to keep SpiderBot powered with Power Cores. I recommended crafting SpiderBot's weapons once you have the required materials, however it's perfectly reasonable to wait until they are needed. See list below. Spiderbot weapons will destroy raw blocks in-game (noticing disappearing blocks near your base?), so its best to start replacing ground you walk on with crafted reinforced blocks made with Construction Paste. Those blocks are also slightly faster to walk on than snow/dirt. * SpiderBot Blaster - Prefers targeting Wasps (Early Game) * SpiderBot Cannon - Targets Heavies (Mid Game) * SpiderBot Particle Rifle - Targets Bosses (Late Game) Tips * Always keep your defenses well-powered. The point here is quality over quantity. A common mistake made by new players is to build a lot of Turrets only to realize they lose power during an attack wave. If a MK3 Turret requires 400 power with a reload time of 4 seconds, that's 100 power per second per turret to keep it fully operational. You can buffer this by building additional power storage blocks. * Build up power reserves. This is a more advanced technique as it requires some balancing but can be overall more cost effective and reduce threat levels. Since your turrets are not always firing, you can save up power in PSBs for when you need it later. With this method, you'll be aiming for a lower, but steady power production vs a high amount of on-demand power production which leads to higher bursts in threat. * Manage threat by relying more on Missiles. A Turret focused attack consumes a lot of power. A lot of power will greatly increase threat thus requiring more Turrets. Missile turrets don't require a lot of power to fire, however they do require a lot of power to craft missiles. If you craft missiles at slower, but reasonable pace, you can keep your threat level lower than you otherwise could with Turrets. * When in doubt, just build more. Threat is capped at 20,000, there is no cap to the number of defenses you can build. Charging the OET will eventually raise your threat level to 20,000 so might as well be prepared. * When charging the OET, the Overminds will send everything they got. Build a massive stockpile of Missiles. You don't want to run out at the last minute. Frozen Factory Defense This section is designed for more experienced players who are familiar with the major content associated with the base game. You must have the Frozen Factory Expansion to experience this content. Guide hopefully coming soon! Category:Guides